The chief executive of Fortescue Metals Group has visited the company's Pilbara sites as the fallout from its spending cutbacks continues.

FMG announced earlier this week it was deferring some of its expansion projects and letting hundreds of staff go.

It follows a slump in iron ore prices due to weakening demand from China.

Workers at FMG's Solomon site say the company's CEO Nev Power addressed them this morning in what they described as a morale-boosting exercise.

It is understood several hundred contractors at the Solomon site have already been sacked.

One contractor has told the ABC, staff were called in earlier this week and told to check a list of names pinned to the wall.

"The people whose names were on there were told they'd been sacked," the worker said.

"Some people were crying, it was pretty awful."

In an interview with the ABC, Nev Power said he was sorry for the job losses.

"What we've had to do given the very low iron ore price that we're seeing come through from China - and that's driven by some poor economic conditions there - we've had to take very quick and decisive action to restore our profitability and to reduce our capital expenditure to ensure that we've got the financial strength to continue running the company and expanding our operations," he said.

"So we have taken the decision to defer the development of our Kings project at Solomon.

"That was a 40 million tonne per annum project due to be brought on stream by June of next year.

"We're deferring that by three to four months to reduce the capital expenditure there.

"Now that won't result in too many contractors being reduced but it will reduce the level of ramp up that we do, and you must remember that we've ramped up very dramatically with our number of people.

"In addition to that we have reduced operating costs around the business to restore profitability and we've reviewed all of our operations including in terms of our employees, our contractors and consultants.

"So we have had to let go several hundred employees and several hundred contractors from across our operations and that is an extremely sad time for us at Fortescue but we've been forced to that by the dire market conditions that we find ourselves in."